Woo Kwang Kien As A Deconstructive Translator

Woo Kwang Kien (1866--1943) was an old translator. He had translated over 130 kinds of books with more than one hundred million words which covered various fields such as literature, history, philosophy and so on. He had been indulged in translation for around 50 years. Woo Kwang Kien had been spoken highly by many of his contemporaries. However, little attention has been paid to him and his translations. This thesis intends to do a research on Woo Kwang Kien as a translator with a case study on his translation of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones from the deconstructive translation perspective.The deconstructionists advocate the rebellious understanding of the key notions in traditional translation, which matches Woo Kwang Kien's unconventional translation thoughts. For example, he and a few other contemporaries adopted the vernacular Chinese while most of his contemporaries adopted wenyan style; he abridged much of the original text and so on.Woo Kwang Kien had formed his own translation thoughts. Referring to poetry translation, he advocated the translatability of the poetry translation as he thought that poetry translation would not be in vain as long as the translator had both Chinese and English foundation; he had different perspectives with Yanfu's"xin","da"and"ya"; as to translation intention, Woo Kwang Kien thought that we Chinese should learn the good from the west as well as fight against the bad. He intended to do so with his translations concerning with his choice of the original works.Woo Kwang Kien held his own viewpoints towards the relationship between the source text and the target text, the relationship between writer and the translator, the shift of translator's status. Woo Kwang Kien's translations focused on the importance of the target text and the translator. He believed that the original text could depend on the target text for its existence and development, the translator was no longer subject to the original author, and the status of the translator was changed. All these match the deconstructive translation thoughts.Woo Kwang Kien was noticeable for his translation quantity and quality and his around-fifty-year translation experience. He had made great contributions to the inter-cultural communication. With a case study on his translation of Tom Jones, we may find that Woo Kwang Kien adopted vernacular Chinese for readers'better understanding. Although his vernacular Chinese was different from both the classical Chinese and the modern Chinese, it was a big challenge to his contemporaries who adopted the wenyan style. In the process of translating Tom Jones, Woo Kwang Kien made many abridgements. In order not to affect the completion of the contents, Woo Kwang Kien adopted annotation. In other words, the intention of his translation was to better understand the western countries. In the case study of his translation of Tom Jones, analysis will be done around the following translation techniques commonly used in his translation -- addition, deletion, information transformation, mistranslation, the vernacular Chinese, abridgement and so on.Woo Kwang Kien's translation thoughts, ie. to deconstruct the authority of the original text, the subjectivity of the writer and the shift of the translator's status, were the rebellious understanding of the traditional translation thoughts; his adoptions of annotation, vernacular Chinese and abridgement were rare among his contemporaries. Hopefully this research may be helpful for further researches on Woo Kwang Kien as a translator.